So today I’m going to ask your opinions on a subject discussed intelligently and at length by a guy named Craig Mod in Tokyo: the disposability of print books.

Craig was brought to my attention—and a lot of other people’s, as well—by the NY Times.

Is it true? Are there more cons to print books than there are pros? Is the digitizing of books a boon to humankind that writers and designers alike should be embracing, an opportunity for our skills and talents to blossom in ways that print books simply can’t handle? Is our attachment to print books an emotional attachment to familiarity rather than artistic common sense? And what about all those dead trees, anyway?

I love print books. I just bought 11 volumes of Thackerey with leather spines and corners, which—so far as I can tell—were probably printed in the 1890s, and they are absolutely the apple of my eye. I don’t own an ereader. I don’t have any plans to acquire one.

There is a concreteness to physical books that’s deeply tied to my identity, my sense of myself. I grew up in a house where bookcases were important and books embodied respect for the intellectual mind. When my parents bought an old Victorian in Bellingham to renovate in the early 1970s, almost the first thing my father did was build a wall of bookshelves across the study, finishing it with care in old-fashioned trim and staining and oiling it to look like it had always been there. He filled it with his books from his college days. That was the world in which he learned the marvelous flexibility of thought, curiosity, creativity.

My mother reads novels. Not cheap crap, but really amazing works by the great wordsmyths of the English language. Those books were around the house throughout my childhood, so I grew up on the nineteenth-century masters, as well as the wonderful language in books written in the early twentieth-century, the Moderns and Post-Moderns. Virginia Woolf’s experimental short-short stories were a part of my childhood experience. She taught me to look meticulously before writing and to choose words to match that meticulous eye.

The smell of those books has been with me since I first learned to read. The beauty of language and craft is tied intimately in my brain to the beloved smell of words.

Now, I’ve seen gadgets come and go for decades. I know how to write computer programs and recently spent a weekend commiserating with a friend who’s a programmer at Apple over the eternal superiority of Unix and C. I live in a house with more computers than media outlets. I could try to be a Luddite, but what would be the point? I work on computers cobbled together by my husband.

I have not been bowled over by the advent of ereaders. “We already have readers,” I say. “I’ve got stacks of them by my chair even as we speak.”

But Craig has really got me thinking about this. Is he right? Is it time for us writers and readers to quit clinging to dying illusions and move into a vibrant new literary reality?

Is that what you’re doing?

We’ve been tinkering with the cover. This is one of the beauties of indie publishing (although I’ve been advised today that that’s a kind of misleading term. . .you’ll read about it next week in my interview with Peter Bowerman, author The Well-Fed Self-Publisher). Not only do I get final say in the design of my cover, but because I have a background in design I can keep tinkering with it right up until the last minute. Not that I advise this. What I really advise is that you hire someone with a background in design and then don’t tinker with nothing. But anyway.

Will you vote on the version you like best? You’ll notice one version actually uses a shorter title. I know, I lost the ampersand I loved, which was my reason for choosing this typeface in the first place. But—as you know—it’s all about the reader’s experience, never about the writer’s.

            

First—why did you pick Lightning Source over the others? Was it the price vs. service level, reputation, print quality, or something else? What publishers have you used in the past?

Lightning Source is a top quality digital printer and a distributor, not really a publisher. I have a great local source for digital printing, which is as cheap when taking into account that they deliver my books for free. I just used their services for my first 50 books. On the other hand, Lightning Source is wholly-owned by the world’s largest book distributor: Ingram. Normally Ingram will not distribute my titles because they require a publisher to offer at least 10 different ones. Because I’m going through Lightning Source, they now will distribute me regardless of how many titles I offer. That’s a huge advantage.

Nor is their service exclusive. They know I can also go local when I need something immediately, and that’s okay by them. A similar service exists from BookSurge, which is owned by Amazon.

What service level did you choose, why, and how much did it cost? Are you happy with what you get for the price?

Because of their distribution service, I have signed on for two levels of service:

The first service is to print any number I order and ship to me to sell as I can, and I pay for shipping. I pay their agreed-to printing price, which varies by page number and size and is spelled out in their downloadable materials.

The second service is for them to print onesies and send them to whatever retailer orders them direct from Ingram distributors. That costs me a standard distributor’s discount of 55% and nothing else for the printing. The retailer pays directly to Ingram for the shipping.

Rights: who retains them, and for how long? In whose name is the ISBN registered?

I supply my ISBN that I obtained on my own from Bowker. The rights are all mine. Remember, these guys are a printer/distributor, not a publisher or a vanity press, some of which (like Publish America) can tie up your rights for seven years or even forever. Caveat Emptor—let the buyer beware.

Self-sales: does the printer give author- or bulk-discounts if I want to purchase copies to distribute locally? Lightning Source is owned by Ingram, with its massive distribution channels. How heavily did that weigh in your choice?

It’s Ingram’s distribution system that is the primary reason I’m using Lightning Source for digital printing. Digital printing is best only for small quantities that may be needed quickly or to test a market or to send to reviewers in advance. Digital printing is too expensive per book to use as a primary source for day-to-day sales to the book industry, which may ask for 40 to 65% trade discounts to do business with retailers and two levels of distributors. For that, you’ll need to take the risk of printing lots of 500 to 1,000 or more via traditional offset printing. Paying more per book for the security of digital printing really isn’t viable over the long run. Lightning Source will be happy to bid on offset print runs—which they will job out—but so will any printer, under the right circumstances.

Quality: some people are saying self-publishing’s not publishing, just really, really, really good photocopying. Is that your experience? Are you pleased with the quality of what you pay for?

Self-publishing is not just printing. It’s doing everything from production to marketing yourself. Digital printing these days, on the other hand, looks as good as offset—with the exception of color printing, where offset printing uses inks that mix and blend, while digital uses either toner or wax in color layers, which usually comes out a little darker than the ink blends.

How do you like working with Lightning Source, personally? Do you find them pleasant and helpful, informative, really inspiring? Or simply business-like? Or does the service kind of suck, but worth it for what you get? Would you recommend others use them, and would you use them again yourselves?

I have been frustrated in that I haven’t been able to use their file-uploading system, for some weird reason. I had to send the files on a CD via US mail. They were nice enough, but insisted that the problem had to be at my end because of my server. This is after trying to use my Mac and my PC on Roadrunner cable from home and my PC laptop over ATT’s DSL system down at our bookstore, The Book Barn. That was frustrating, but I worked around it. Fortunately, I had that local source for digital printing that tided me over with an initial print run of 50 copies.

Remember, also, that I do true full-service publishing for myself. I don’t need iUniverse or Booklocker or Author House, et al, because I can do all the things they offer for cheaper and with total control.

Bob Spear is the author of Quad Delta, among other self-published titles. He can be reached through Sharp Spear Enterprises and his Book Trends blog.

I spent yesterday morning in a fascinating conversation, a twenty-minute interview that ballooned into an hour and a half. I was talking to She Writes member Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, author of the independently-published Silent Sorority.

Indie publishing is at an extraordinary crossroads. Right now—today, this minute—it’s evolving out of the old vanity press model, through a veritable tsunami of slush that couldn’t get accepted by traditional publishers, into a radical new paradigm in which excellent authors deliberately choose indie over traditional publishing. They’re carving out a new publishing world, and as the stigma of self-publishing slowly disintegrates, authors can now publicly admit to their excitement over the flexibility and creative possibilities in going independent.

The truth is I’ve always kind of hankered after publishing my own work.

I’ve been writing for so long, and I have so much background in the actual mechanics of publication from my years in the composing departments of newspapers, that I’ve never been able to totally convince myself traditional publishing was worth all the effort. You pursue agents, so they can pursue acquisitions editors, so they can pursue their colleagues, so they can pursue distributors’ reps, so they can pursue booksellers, and maybe, somewhere down the line, you can sell a book to a stranger.

And, besides, I’ve been traditionally published. I know perfectly well how little an author makes. I’ve gotten used to nice, fat writing paychecks in the technical industry, and it never made any sense to pin my hopes on a career path that obviously couldn’t compare.

And now publishing houses are laying off editors in droves, agents are scrambling to make up the difference, and even award-winning publishing authors are losing their publishers. Coincidentally, the technology of ebooks and ereaders has suddenly become mainstream, along with POD and self-publishing. Six years ago, when I wrote my first annual chapter book for my son, my husband and I had to find a local bookbinder to hand bind a single copy. Now we can get it done professionally for a matter of a few bucks.

In only the last year, the independent publishing industry has exploded into an incredible primordial soup.

I began researching and blogging on this phenomenon a year ago, when I first began professionally editing fiction writers in the online community. At that time, serious professional writers were hiring independent editors, but not very many of them and not right out in front of everyone. Even six months ago agents were still telling aspiring writers, “You don’t need a editor.” (Some of them still do.) And I was blogging about the similarity between that moment in history and another moment, not so many decades ago, when publishers told aspiring writers, “You don’t need an agent.”

“The smart agents,” I said, “are going to start sending clients to independent editors.”

And now agents routinely send us aspiring writers. “The market’s very, very tough,” they’re saying. “Get all the help you can.”

In the same vein, a year ago traditional publishers were telling aspiring writers, “Don’t self-publish. No matter what your actual motivation, we will take it as incontrovertible proof that no other publishers would take you, and we won’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.” Six months later I was hearing from top acquisitions editors they were buying self-published books. “They’re proving through sales they’re really good!” Now, this morning, I heard about an author who turned to indie publishing after he’d not only been accepted by an agent and one of the big-name traditional publishers, but assigned an editor, for whom he waited quite awhile before discovering she’d been laid off. His traditionally-publishable book was dead in the water, and rather than waste any more time and energy he went with Smashwords. Any author can now hire an editor and designer, get their own ISBN and copyright, and collect all their own royalties.

I can make my book anything I like. I have complete control over my title, my cover, my design, and my words. (That’s my hand-built desk in the cover photo! That’s my irascible cat!) My book doesn’t have to fit the standard model of a likely best seller by which traditional publishers make their decisions. I can promote it however I like. I can say whatever I like.

I can go renegade.

This is one of those wild-cat moments in the history of an industry you can’t plan for, you can’t deliberately create, you can’t even always recognize when you find yourself right smack in the middle. But you can look back on it later and wish you’d been a part of it.

Indie publishing.

Writing’s always been a fun idea for people who really like written language and telling stories (some folks call them “lies”), and lots of us out here have been noodling around with words and sentences and characters and plotlines for decades, enjoying ourselves mightily the whole while.

But suddenly in recent years there’s been this explosion of massive marketing aimed at people who don’t really know writing—most notably the latest rage to skip working on your writing skills and go straight for the platform—fueled by the very industry that feeds off the dreams of aspiring hopefuls. And it’s insane. You can’t be a professional writer if you don’t learn how to write! And you can’t earn money at it if you like don’t like doing what you have to do to earn it!

Me, I don’t mind technical writing. It’s all about organization and clarity, translating complex ideas into simple language, which appeals to me. It also comes with a salary, so I don’t have to keep asking my boss over and over and over again to hire me back. Even now that I’m not working full-time in the industry anymore, I prefer contracting. It pays really good.

I don’t much like freelance nonfiction work. I don’t like competing with all the other freelancers over who’s got the best clippings. I don’t like the constant self-sell. It taxes my lily-white brain. So I pretty much leave it to the people who don’t mind that stuff, like my friends and husband.

Of course, I love fiction. I love working with fiction authors. I love reading fiction. I love writing it. However, as with freelance nonfiction, I’m basically lazy and don’t send stuff out all that often. I get busy. . .

The worst part of the publishing industry these days is the economy. Because, as more and more professionals in the industry get laid off and turn to freelance work teaching others how to do what they used to do, the more innocent hopefuls are pulled into the vortex. And the harder and harder it becomes to sell any writing, no matter how great, making the vortex that much darker for everyone.

My closest writer friend tells me I should stop saying things like that, since my own work feeds off your innocent assumption that if I edit your work you can get it published. It’s perfectly true that I can edit your manuscript to be not just publishable, but the highest quality it can possibly be. (That difference, unfortunately, gets bigger every day.) I do know how to do that. Really well.

But please, guys, understand what professional writing is. Understand what it isn’t.

Understand your dreams.

She did her due diligence, spent five years writing her book, hired an editor and designer, identified her unique, focused market, and blogged and networked conscientiously to build her platform. (You should see the number of comments on her site.) She researched agents and had some enlightening conversations. The bottom line? She was writing for “too specialized” a target market. No one would publish for an audience “that small.”

Pamela’s niche market? The infertile for whom medical intervention does not work. Those who fall through the cracks of the massive fertility industry ($3 billion in the U.S. alone). A grieving community for whom no books, apparently, are published—not because those readers aren’t there, but because nobody in traditional publishing knows they are.

Pamela is one writer who is also a successful marketer. And she agreed to be my next interviewee on indie publishing.

First—what publisher did you use? Why? Was it the price vs. service level, reputation, print quality, or something else?

BookSurge. It was at the time one of two companies that Amazon had acquired.

I did a lot of diligence about what different vendors would provide in the way of services. I wanted control over artwork and cover—BookSurge did offer turnkey, but they also had a very lightweight offering that said, If you provide us with everything, we will assign you a publishing consultant to guide you through the process. It was $300 to turn over my fully-formatted and -designed book.

They sent two different final proofs, with covers, to read. I found a few more typos I didn’t catch in my formatted files and got them back to them for revision. I approved the final galley, and within a week it was up and available for purchase on Amazon.

What service level did you choose, why, and how much did it cost? Were you happy with what you got for the price?

BookSurge no longer exists—it got merged with CreateSpace—so I was lucky, I got the tail end, because CreateSpace at the time was entirely self-service. At BookSurge, I had the name of a person who was my account contact, so I had a go-to person. At CreateSpace, in April 2009, you didn’t have that extra layer of protection in terms of service available. (I recently found a link that compares the BookSurge to CreateSpace offerings.)

Rights: who retains them, and for how long? In whose name is the ISBN registered?

I own my copyright. I did register for it. It’s one of those administrative tasks that are absolutely must-have. I applied to the copyright office a year before my book came out. I submitted for the copyright, ISBN, Library of Congress, all in my own name.

Daniel Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual is phenomenal. He’s really good about giving self-pub authors help, he’ll sit the book on his website, he’s got a newsletter. It’s been around for awhile, and he’s updated and added a bunch of things.

His recommendation was to create your own publishing company. (It was way too much to do for tax purposes, for me). He has a checklist.

Self-sales: does the printer give author- or bulk-discounts if I want to purchase copies to distribute locally? If the publisher is not associated with a major distribution channel (like Ingram), doesn’t it then cost a lot of money to place physical copies at local bookstores?

CreateSpace is associated with Ingram. CreateSpace allows me to buy one copy and gives me an online store, whereas BookSurge had an author discount only if you bought a bulk number of copies.

My royalties went up when BookSurge merged with CreateSpace. If you click on Buy the Book, it takes you to what looks like a storefront. Amazon completes the transaction, but I get $8.50 for every book sold on my storefront, and on Amazon I get $5.75. My cost for books I buy is only $3.44.

I have had a couple of wholesale distributors buy, but for most folks fertility is a fairly narrow topic, so if you’re a bookseller my book is not necessarily a must-have.

Barnes & Noble—I ended up sending a copy of my book to B&N for review, and I got this very official form letter that said, We don’t believe this title has a broad distribution opportunity, so no, thanks. But I ended up going through Smashwords. The CEO/Founder Mark Coker does an amazing job (for no charge) helping authors convert their manuscripts to ebook formats. He has a relationship with B&N and Sony, and in a matter of weeks—literally, from the time I took it from print PDF to ebook—it became available through B&N. (You can submit your book separately as a Kindle, but you get higher royalties through Smashwords.)

Depending on what you sign up for, the way of quality control, you may get different experiences. But CreateSpace and Smashwords are as good as a bookstore. And I would encourage people to take copies to libraries.

Quality: some people are saying indie publishing companies are not publishers, just really, really, really good photocopiers. Was that your experience? Where you pleased with the quality of what you paid for?

The book quality, in the end, was as good as you’d find in a library or bookstore. I did hire a book designer, which gave me professionally-formatted PDF files that were then uploaded and used for the first book proof. I took the time to get a good book designer. I found her on on Elance, a San Francisco Bay Area marketplace of freelancers. I typed in a proposal, and people bid on the project. Elance is great. You can check references. They take a small percentage of the total amount paid. I also hired a great editor.

You know, If someone just has a personal interest in sharing a story with immediate family and friends, there are tools that allow people to do that. Shutterfly—there are a variety of other ones—there are ways to create mini-photo books. They’re boardbound.

How did you like working with this publisher, personally? Did you find them pleasant and helpful, informative, really inspiring? Or simply business-like? Or did the service kind of suck, but it was worth it for what you got? Would you recommend others use them, and would you use them again yourselves?

Smashwords is very, very professional, and, as I say with BooSsurge, they would send me emails in response to everything I was doing, and at the bottom of each email it said, If you’re not satisfied, here’s the customer service info.

Can you tell us how sales have been?

It’s been really good, based on just word of mouth, and my sales are increasing, month-over-month, trending up as I get deeper into the communities of interest.

I’m contributing articles to blog sites that range from Open Salon to Divine Caroline to Fertility Authority. In some cases I’m compensated for my posts, and sometimes not, but it really does have a multiplier effect. At the Huffington Post, for example, there’s a woman who teaches women’s studies in Houston, and I get involved in those conversations. It does generate a moving flywheel. Get that flywheel spinning, the royalties start coming in.

I set my price by looking at other comparable books. It’s a balancing act. I chose a price significant enough that, if someone truly wanted to buy it, I wanted them to think it was worth the time. Based on other books in the marketplace on this topic, and the fact that it is a first run, I chose $14.95 because it’s under $15, and hardcovers are around $25.

You have to look at the economics of it at all. For the publishing houses to make an investment, they are taking a big risk. Consequently they have to figure out that the market truly is big enough to support a particular title. At the same time, what happens is there are always going to be niche books. I fully understand that my book will never be a best seller. But the people who are interested in it—people in the infertility community—read everything they can. They have the time. They’re sitting in doctor’s offices! These people are voracious.

I’m reaching an international marketplace. In fact, two of my biggest markets are in South Africa and Australia. I don’t know if there would be this opportunity for me without Amazon. Because it’s Amazon.

Interesting point—I did a fair number of interviews with authors who had gone the traditional versus indie route. After a certain time, traditionally-published books became unavailable. With indie publishing, I jokingly say my nieces and nephews will be getting my royalties in perpetuity. I’m finding the people are very loyal readers. They want the book on their bookshelves. My resale price is twice as big as my real price because a lot of those are being sold in Euros. Another woman did go through traditional publishing at the same time I did, but her book was safer and a how-to manual. She and I are listed as comps. Her books went from $15 to $6, and the price of mine is staying constant. I don’t know what was the initial agreement with her publisher. But, you know, my book will always be available.

Is there anything you would have done differently? Any specific advice you have for others considering independent publishing?

The only thing would be to have been given myself more time to do pre-launch book promotion. I was dead set on getting it out by Mother’s Day, so as a result I really rushed my own promotions. I pitched media first and then put out a press release. I know the drill. I had predetermined a number of bloggers and sent them copies and knew full well that they could have given me a thumbs-down. Fortunately the reviews came in positive.

Nonfiction in particular is an easier way to pursue indie publishing than fiction because there are ways to get into industry groups. I wrote a business plan for my book. There’s an industry around fertility, so I know how to work those channels. If you’re writing a book about infertility, you have to be smart and differentiated. I knew that, since 99.9% of the books out there have been written by mothers, I had a unique voice.

Silent Sorority came out on April 18, 2009. I did a fairly heavy amount of promotion in the May-June-July timeframe. I’ve got a community of readers who read my blog regularly. I had a post up called Birth Announcement for my book.

The workload now feels infinitely lighter than trying to get the book ready for publication. That, for me, was the hard process. A really fine-tuned social appointment, a set of reporters I know, Google set for topics. Now it’s seamless. I do this for a living, so it seems perfectly easy to spend an hour a day scoping about who’s writing about what.

Any other points or stories you’d like to elaborate upon? If I missed something significant that you think others should know about, please do talk about it.

I will say to your point earlier that there is nothing easy about publishing these days, whether it’s through traditional or indie. As the author you are 100% accountable for the publishing of your material.

Indie publishing’s got a negative connotation based on the marketplace. I really was very reluctant to move toward self-publishing, worried it would signal that my writing wasn’t of a good-enough caliber. I was extremely hard on myself when it came to the manuscript. I rewrote it three times over five years. I think you really need to think hard about: Are you propagating the myth of junk? Or are you really truly holding yourself to a high standard, such as you’d get from an external source?

I was reluctant to associate myself with anything that could be perceived as vanity press. And let me be clear: broadcasting to the world that you couldn’t conceive isn’t something you do for vanity purposes. In fact, I didn’t tell family and friends that my book was available right away. They found out about it after I’d already sold a bunch of books.

Realistically—I’ve been around the block (I’ve been blogging for three years)—my intent initially was to build a community and see what the level of appetite was for the type of book I was writing. I signed up for a couple of helpful search engines, went diligently and found out what agents work in what topics—Who do these agents represent? Do they look at issues outside conventional wisdom? And I put very specific pitches together. What I found was really interesting. The response was, “You’re involved in a particularly unusual topic that doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into the traditional publishing world model, so I don’t know that I’d be successful at pitching your idea. It doesn’t fit into their categories.”

Would my idea in itself be interesting because it’s different? I had three or four conversations with agents about this, but they didn’t feel they could make an adequate commission (reading between the lines). Pub houses were tightening the filter, so it had to be a blockbuster type of book.

Which reminded me of the movie studios. There was a time when if it didn’t fit the model it wasn’t used.

I spent eighteen months chasing the traditional publishing world, and I thought, Okay. I work in marketing. I’m just going to do that. I became the contractor for my own book.

I think we’re in the really early days of indie publishing. There are those of us who have decided we don’t fit the formula. When I’m talking to those who have created an economic arbiter—like Hollywood—I don’t lead with the fact that I’ve self-published, I just say it’s available.

Publishers were once the arbiters of good taste. Now it’s the readers who decide what’s good and what’s not. I’ve got thirty reviews on Amazon—thirty-two if you count Amazon.ca—twenty-eight five-star and two four-star.

You said you asked yourself, What is my objective, as an author?

Yes. I was feeling isolated in my infertility experience, I had enough angst about it that I went to the library, I went online. I could find no books by women about infertility who were not mothers. It became evident that there were a whole bunch of issues that hadn’t been covered—the stigma associated with failed infertility treatment. There were no appropriate guidelines for how you grieve and move on through that experience. I got so annoyed, I thought, Hell, I’ve got to change that.

I was shocked by how the fertility industry had become all about the business, not about the individuals seeking treatment. I was flying back from a business trip, and I was in business class, and this young woman was chatting near me with the flight attendant. The flight attendant asked, “What do you do?” and she said, “I’m a med student. I’ve been doing a lot of research, and the highest-paid doctors are in fertility.” Fertility and plastic surgery, those were her two options. The highest money. That’s nasty.

Because there are huge emotional issues associated with finding out you may never have a child. One of the things I put out to people is there is a belief—in society—that if you never actually delivered a child you have no loss. There is this weird sense that you have to have diapered a baby, or you have not suffered any real loss. The creation of embryos, really truly—when you have for the first time gotten an alpha pregnancy—you associate a life and a set of dreams with those early days. To know that others disregard that completely? It’s devastating that there is no support system. So if you’re out there trying to work through that set of emotions, you don’t have a natural safety net, a safe harbor to work through the loss of a fragile dream.

The reader email I get now breaks your heart.

They say, “Nobody understood what I was living through. You have given me a voice I never had.”

Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos is the author of Silent Sorority. She can be reached through both her blog and her book.